In 1978, Roz Chast published her first cartoon in The New Yorker, Little Things. It featured imaginary widgets with their nonsense labels. Chast’s debut is a satire of the arbitrary, nonsensical nature of the words we assign to novelty.

In the world of VR, people are creating radically new experiences and have the opportunity to name and label, which have consequences on cognition. What starts out as unfamiliar will become familiar. Newly coined terms have become essential tools for thriving in new contexts. Consider the use of “mouse”, “dongle”, “spam”, “ping”, “meme”, “hashtag”, “lulz” online.

Smart labeling is one of the most important (and underestimated!) aspects of designing a successful VR/AR experience. I would argue that if you’re designing VR/AR experiences, failure to effectively label could imperil your whole project.

Access to language and labels changes cognitive processing. In VR there is the opportunity to create whole worlds with novel objects and new labels. Designers should be mindful of the cognitive effort that this creates for people inside of their experience. By giving people access to language and labels, they can go through an experience more quickly and easily. Consider two examples from the world of VR / AR.

The Microsoft Hololens teaches people the "Bloom" hand gesture. Bloom is a special system gesture that is used to go back to the Start Menu. It's a common word that most English speakers know and it makes it easy to remember as a navigation tool. In contrast, Aperture Robot Repair (an experience made by Valve for the HTC Vive) gives very generic instructions for people to place their controllers in a certain area to charge them, but it can take some users (like me!) a long time to actually figure out what I'm actually supposed to do to get to the next part of the experience.

MS Hololens: To do the bloom gesture, hold out your hand, palm up, with your fingertips together. Then open your hand.

It's not that Hololens is good or Aperture Robot Repair is bad. It's just a different experience for people. When designing for new mediums, consider how much information and guidance users should get inside of their experience. Perhaps developing novel objects such as the “Chent” or the “Spak” is the right choice for your VR experience, but it will slow down your users and cause more effort, especially if you only give them one path to learning it (vision) instead of multiple pathways in the brain (language and vision). Let’s consider what is the right amount of information to help people learn and track information inside of a digital experience.

ACCESS TO LABELS SPEEDS PROCESSING

Language speeds cognitive processing and reaction times. That means that if you want to introduce new objects, make access to language and labels easy. I’m saying “access” to labels because designers don’t have to specifically label a red, round fruit with the word “apple.” However, they can use objects that are easy for people to label with their own mental resources. The following excerpts are from Drunk Tank Pink:

"The notion of that labels change how we see the world predates the blue-matching experiment by almost eighty years. In the 1930s, Benjamin Whorf argued that words shape how we see objects, people, and places. According to one apocryphal tale, the Inuit people of the Arctic discern dozens of types of snow because they have a different words for each type. In contrast, the rest of the world has perhaps several words - like snow, slush, sleet, and ice. The story isn’t true (the Inuit describe snow with roughly the same number of words as [non-Inuit] do), but it paints a compelling picture: it’s much harder to convey what’s in front of you if you don’t have words to describe it. Young children illustrate this difficulty vividly as they acquire vocabulary - once they learn to call one four-legged creature with a tail a “dog,” every four-legged creative with a tail is a dog. Until they learn otherwise, cats and ponies share the same features, so they seem just as doggish as real dogs.”

There was a clever experiment that tested this phenomenon. Due to linguistic differences between English and Russian, cognitive scientists were able to parse how the ability to label a color with specificity affected people’s reaction time.

“Colors and their labels are inextricably linked. Without labels, we’re unable to categorize colors - to distinguish between ivory, beige, wheat, and eggshell and to recognize that broccoli heads and stalks are both green despite differing in tone. To show the importance of color labels, in the mid-2000s, a team of psychologists capitalized on a difference between color terms in the English and Russian languages. In English, we use the word blue to describe both dark and light blues, encompassing shades from pale sky blue to deep navy blue. In contrast, Russians use two different words goluboy (lighter blue) and siniy (darker blue).

The researchers asked English-speaking and Russian-speaking students to decide which of the two blue squares matched a third blue target square on a computer screen. The students performed the same task many times. Sometimes both the squares were light blue and sometimes both were dark blue, and sometimes one of them was light blue and the other was dark blue. When both fell on the same side of the blue spectrum - either light or dark blue - the English and Russian students were equally quick to determine which of the squares matched the colors of the third target square. But the request was quite difference when one of the colored was lighter blue (or goluboy according to the Russian students) and the other was siniy (darker blue). On those trials, the Russian students were much quicker to decide which square matches the color of the target square."

While the English students probably looked at the target blue square and decided that it was “sort of lightish blue” or “sort of darkish blue” their labels were never more precise than that. They were forced to decide which of the other blue squares matched that vague description. The Russian students were at a distinct advantage, they looked at the square and decided that it was either goluboy or siniy. Then all they had to do was look at the other squares and decide which one shared the label. Imagine how much easier the task would have been for the English students if they had been looking at one blue square and one green square; as soon as they determined whether the target square was blue or green, the task was trivially easy. In fact, an experiment published one year later showed that Russian students perceive dark blue to be just as different from light blue as the color green is from the color blue to English students. When Russian student located a dark blue square wishing an array of light blue squares, part of the visual field within their brain light up to a signal that they had perceived the odd square.

The same brain areas were much less active when English students look at the same array of squares - except when the odd square was green within an array of blue squares. When the colors had different labels for the English students, their brain responded like the brains of the Russian students.

In comparison with hard-to-name colors, perceptual discrimination of easy-to-name colors elicited unique activation in the posterior portion of the left superior temporal gyrus, left inferior parietal lobule, left precuneus, and left postcentral gyrus were statistically stronger for easy-to-name colors. No regions showed stronger activity for the discrimination of the hard-to-name colors.

We also know that the Russian students relied on these category names, because their advantage of the English students disappeared altogether when they were asked to remember a string of numbers while they were performing the color discrimination task. Since their resources for processing language were already occupied with the task of repeating the number string, they weren’t able to rehearse the names of the colors. Without the aid of linguistic labels, they were forced to process the colors just like the English-speaking students. This elegant experiment shows that color labels show how people see the world of color. The Russian and English students and the same mental architecture - the same ability to perceive and process the colors in front of them - but the Russians had the distinct advantage of two labels where the English students had just one. This example is striking because it shows that even our perception of basic properties of the world, like color, is malleable in the hands of labels.

Interestingly, the researchers didn’t have to actually label the squares with words in order for people to activate the language centers of their brain. And when they put people under cognitive load by asking them to remember a string of numbers, the Russian-speakers cold not access the linguistic labels and their performance decreased to the same baseline of the English speakers.

Failure to use language and labels in an effective way can sabotage an experience in VR/AR. Try working backwards from the experience that you want your user to have and consider what their level of knowledge will be when they arrive to your experience.

People use language as part of perception. Language affects patterns of brain activation. In my next post, I'm going to discuss language metaphors because they are one of the most important tools of knowledge acquisition that humans possess! All VR/AR experience designers should command metaphors to immerse people in an experience.

Further Reading

Roz Chast has published over 1200 cartoons in the New Yorker since 1978.

The Extended Mind is a Portland-based research firm that applies behavioral science to increase user engagement in immersive technologies. Jessica Outlaw, the founder of The Extended Mind, is also a winner of the 2017 Oculus Launch Pad competition.